For preparing and planning medical procedures, it may be beneficial to determine a physical property, e.g. a length, diameter or dimension of an object, for example an anatomical structure, before beginning an actual operation.
E.g. in the case of minimally invasive surgery, for example for planning of a minimally invasive valve replacement procedure, different diameter values of a blood vessel, in particular the aorta along the aortic bulbus and its surrounding structures may be required. According measurements may be employed to subsequently determine a size of a suitable valve replacement element or stent.
Currently, desired physical properties may be determined manually, e.g. by medical personnel, employing pre-interventional medical image data, for example CT data. Such a manual determination however may result in a substantially non-repeatable measurement procedure, possibly obtaining diameter values, which are not well-defined or to some extent incorrect.
Thus, there may be a need for an improvement in the quality of a determination of a physical property, e.g. a diameter, of a vessel structure.
Document US 2007/0197898 A1 describes determining a vessel diameter by calculating the perpendicular distance between an inner wall of a vessel and a center path.